Towards the end of second year, dissertation became of significant importance and initially I was intimidated by the idea of writing a 10,000 word thesis on anything that interested me. I had weekly seminars to help prepare research and direction into a chosen topic. From first year, I quickly took interest in modern technology and after attending one of the available constellations with Clive, the seminars looked at what made an object a tool or artefact. This was one of my first experiences of looking at the psychology of technology and it really sparked an interest which influenced later essays, and led me to learn about the Internet of Things during a field module in second year. The constellation seminars during second year highlighted past issues of previous student dissertations and gave me tips on what to avoid and include within my own dissertation research and helped me to decide on a topic which was relevant to my practise.

I chose to focus my dissertation research on advertisement and how the advances in technology influenced advertisement strategies. My initial inspiration for this was post-modern digital advertisement which we experience today, I wanted to learn more about tracking methods and how the wide web could understand my online behaviour and recommend me products, it was a scary thought and made me question the privacy I actually had when online. From here I was curious as to how advertisement had got to this point in time and where consumeristic advertisement originated from. Advertisement linked to my practice as a graphic designer and I felt that by understanding the previous ways of marketing techniques would enable me to prepare for a future industry which interests me as a career choice.

Today, we are bombarded with advertisement from posters to pervasive ads on mobile games. We are great at ignoring them and I can properly speak for the majority when I say we wait for that all important ‘skip’ or ‘x’ button to appear. However, in a world were advertisement is becoming more difficult to create brand loyalty and appeal to consumers, how do subliminal messages affect our behaviour. I was super interested in the Industrial Revolution which influenced mass consumerism and the golden age, the creative revolution and ultimately the digital revolution centuries later.

Throughout third year I have learnt a huge amount from researching and generally being curious in the history of advertising and how agencies use rational or emotional techniques to create a desire for a given product or awareness campaign. I researched a range of theories relevant to advertising and culture and some made me think differently after realising method behind the ideologies. One example of this is Technological Determinism. This was a reductionist theoretical framework which presumed that a society’s technology controlled the development of its social structure and cultural values. Originally coined by Thorstein Veblen, I have focused on a revitalised edition by Karl Marx who looks at productive technologies relevant to my area of research. It argues that technological development determines social change from the way people interact with others and how they think. This is an inevitable course and suggests that technology is uncontrollable and will continue to dominate our lives for the foreseeable future. Rosalind Williams describes the process as ‘a three-word logical proposition: Technology determines history’. However I argue that Advertisement is an initial governing force to promoting such technologies which creates the demand.

From writing my thesis, I have researched into wacky and useful topics that would have gone unnoticed otherwise. I have learnt a great deal from consumerism in the early 19th century to how Propaganda was used to create nationalism and encourage prosperity at a time of economic recession.In some cases however, I lacked the ability to link methodology and theorists to my thesis of technological advancements and felt I went off-topic through exploration in irrelevant marketing. After writing a basic draft of each chapter I revisited these areas and spent my time refining them, making sure they were referring to my question and discussed relevant theories throughout technological progression.

My main issue was finding relevant books on advertising strategies which were influenced by technology, this was resolved by researching journals and books online and reading case studies for marketing campaigns throughout different eras and comparing these techniques and analysing what remained the same. Another example of this is the theory of Homo-Consumercus by Gad Saad. In this theory, Saad suggests that advertisers target the biological instincts of the consumer to create emotion connections to desire.